Option Settings

The Option Settings section defines the software interface with your CSA members. We suggest that you carefully review the individual items as they determine a good portion of your store’s behavior, and select appropriate settings for each item within this area.

Store Settings: check to Activate these features. Uncheck to not use them.

Store Coupons: If you will be using coupons as part of your store, check this box. When you select this option, an additional tab labeled “Coupons” will appear to the right of Settings in the green navigation bar.

Payment Methods: Subscription By Check, this must be checked to sell whole season shares. The box will enlarge to permit you to offer a discount on the subscription payment made by check.

Allow Subscribers To: Several of these settings are pre-checked default settings. These settings allow the member to manage certain changes or cancelations themselves using their member dashboard. Donate, the default of which is unchecked, is actually a subset of hold, which allows the member to donate the contents of their held delivery. Please uncheck any items that do not fit with your farm’s policies.

Membership fees: Check on the box if your farm charges a membership fee; add the amount of the fee and select the billing frequency.

Debit Held Deliveries: Checking this setting avoids the need to issue “credits” when a box is held. To the member, this is a “use it or lose it” situation. The member is allowed to hold a delivery, but knows if they place an individual delivery on hold, they will not get compensated at another time. Note: This option can be applied to all payment methods except “Recurring” billing.

Cancel Stale Subscriptions: If you offer recurring billing, some members may decide not to continue receiving boxes by not updating old/failing credit card data, but their subscriptions will remain "active" in CSA Manager. These are not canceled automatically to give you the option of calling the member to remind them to update their billing info. (The system does send each member one email reminder.) Eventually canceling these subscriptions is important because they are counted as "active" until they are canceled, so your statistics will be off until they are canceled. You can always do it manually, but this checking the box by this setting tells the software to automatically cancel these expired subscriptions after a given number of weeks.

CSA Subscription Frequencies: In this field you are choosing the different subscription frequencies that will be presented to you by CSA Manager when you create a new share. Here in the Settings, you can either select only those you know you will definitely use, or check all the options knowing that you can pare down the list to only the relevant options when you create the product listing for a new share.

Labels: For assistance with deliveries, the farmer will typically use box labels, sign-in sheets, or both. If you choose to use labels, you can select to print the “Subscriber Note” (such as, “No Peanuts”) directly on the label for that member’s delivery, using the first check box. If you’d like to remind the member that their subscription is ending, the software can print a “Last Box” notice on the member’s label. The notice will actually appear twice, once as a reminder on the week before the subscription ends, and a second and last time on the week the subscription delivery stops. Depending on the label stock you choose to use in your printer, you can select the larger label (3 1/3” x 4” labels, 6 labels/page) or smaller label (3 column format, 2” x 4” labels, 10 labels per page).

Sign-In Sheets: The majority of CSA Manager farmers choose to use sign-in sheets over labels. The three default settings, which are checked on the printed example, include the phone number, the box and add-on counts, and the Instruction information. The sign-in sheet can include columns for additional information such as “Returned Box” or “Returned Jar/Container.” Based on your printer capability, you can select the font size in which your sign-in sheets will be printed. The “Standard” font provides about 15 to 20 sign-in lines per page. The “Small” font option provides about 30 lines per page, while the “Tiny” option prints about 50 sign-in lines per page, which may be difficult to read easily.